Earthquake Games

by Bonnie Ramthun

  “What do you remember about the accident?”

  “We were in Rapid City, South Dakota. It had taken us a long time to get there because she spent some time in Las Vegas, a couple of months I think. I think I must have been born in California, but I’m not sure. It just seems that Las Vegas to South Dakota makes sense if you started out in California. Anyway, I remember all the lights in Las Vegas, how the lights made the night seem like day. She bought me a new doll in Las Vegas but she burned it at the end, the last day.”

  “She was erasing your identities?”

  “Yeah, I guess that was the idea. One night we drove to a campground and she burned everything except our clothes.”

  “License plates?”

  “Buried them, I guess, or hid them somewhere. So we were in the car and she was crying, and humming, and then she’d sing a little bit and then cry some more, and I kept telling her I was hungry, and she told me I wouldn’t be hungry soon. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that was a very pale pink, I remember, and she had red hair like mine and she just looked beautiful, and wild, and, and—”

  “Crazy,” Gerri commented. “You can say crazy. What you mean is that she was very ill, Eileen.”

  “Yes,” Eileen sighed. “She was ill. I know that now. I took a course in college, psychology, and there was a chapter on manic-depressives and—Pow!—there was my mom, staring me in the face. Everything I remembered about her fit the profile.”

  “Any signs of that illness in you?” Gerri asked, voicing Eileen’s worst fear in the most casual tones imaginable. Eileen laid a hand across her belly, but apparently her stomach had decided that throwing up was not going to happen this morning. Her stomach gave another lurch, and that was all.

  “None that I’ve seen,” Eileen said, trying for the same even tone. “I had the psych tests done before I entered the Police Academy. So far, I think I dodged the bullet.”

  “That’s a relief,” Gerri said neutrally.

  “I’ll say,” Eileen said fervently.

  “So, your mom managed to kill herself but not you. How long before you were found?”

  “Less than five minutes,” Eileen said. “My angel was watching over me, that’s what Mom—my adoptive mom, now, not my birth mom—says.”

  It was like an angel had sent them, Paul and Tracy Reed of Wyoming. They picked up their mail in Belle Fouche, South Dakota, because that was the closest town to their ranch. But their baby was in the hospital in Rapid City, their little boy slowly dying in an incubator. They’d both gone home for a day to look after the ranch and to try to come to grips with what was going to happen, something their doctor had talked them into after their third dreadful week at the hospital. There was no way to know that little John Reed would be born with transposition of the vessels of the heart. The condition was a simple blunder of nature, a mix-up where fresh oxygenated blood circulated through the lungs, and old, used-up blood circulated through the body. The doctors had put a shunt in his chest and had operated twice. A transplant heart was the only option in John’s case, and there wasn’t one available. So John Reed slowly slipped away, and Paul Reed wondered if he were going to lose Tracy along with John. She was mad with grief and helplessness, and even one day away from his side was too much for her. She’d insisted they leave that evening, not wait until morning.

  So there they were, two people with broken hearts, and they saw the dirty sedan flipping and corkscrewing through the air, and the abrupt star shape in the windshield that meant that someone had probably just died. The night had been quiet and still and warm, with the fragile scent of early spring in the air and the stars so thick in the sky the Milky Way itself was visible, hanging over them like a shroud. Tracy had the window down, her hair blowing back in the breeze, and she smelled the black scent of burning rubber and the sharpness of the spilling gasoline as the car passed them, tumbling into the ditch by the side of the road.

  Paul stomped on the brakes and their truck skidded to a stop, adding their own stink of rubber to the still night air.

  “Oh my god, Tracy,” he gasped. “Hang on.” He reversed the engine and backed up the road, tires squealing, and came to a stop next to the silent wreck. They both sat there, paralyzed, looking at the crumpled thing that had been a car. One wheel spun crazily, upside down.

  Then, from a thousand miles away, it seemed, they heard the tiny wail of a child.

  “Oh,” Gerri said, her pen forgotten in her hand. “They found you.”

  “They found me,” Eileen said, and shrugged her shoulders. “Their child was dying and God dropped me into their arms. I was trapped in the wreck, but I wasn’t badly hurt. A piece of glass cut my arm. They were afraid of a head injury, of course. They were Wyoming ranchers, and they’d seen wrecks on rural highways before. So Dad stayed with me and Mom drove into town to get the ambulance and the police.”

  “That’s odd. Why Tracy, instead of Paul?”

  “Because Dad worked at the hospital when he was in college, learning Agricultural Engineering. Actually, he told me later, most of his training came from the veterinary courses he took. So he wormed his way into the wreck and put a towel around me and immobilized my head, just the way he’d been taught. Then he put his socks over the cut on my arm, and laid his head right next to mine and talked to me nonstop until the ambulance got there. Mom went screaming into town and brought back, well, everybody, I think. Fire truck, ambulance, police.”

  “And your birth mom?”

  “Dead just the way she wanted,” Eileen said without emotion. “Painlessly, I think. Dad said she was completely still, not a sign of life. I couldn’t see her in the wreck, which was a mercy.”

  “I was a difficult problem for the police, as you might imagine. Dead woman, living child, not a clue as to her identity. The only thing they found was my first name, and that didn’t turn up anything. Evidently my father hadn’t filed a missing persons report.”

  “Maybe she killed him before she left,” Gerri mused.

  Eileen bit back a response and nodded as though thinking that idea over.

  “At any rate, your brother died, is that right?”

  “Within a few hours after I got there. While I was in X ray, and they were deciding I didn’t have a head injury. As though he were waiting for me to come so he could go ahead and go.” Eileen swallowed past something in her throat. If there was an angel in her life, his name was John Reed, she thought, and gave a silent little prayer up for him.

  “So how did they end up adopting you? Were you in foster care?”

  “They were my foster care,” Eileen said. “This is rural South Dakota. They don’t even have much of a social services department there. They had a bureau of Indian affairs office that dealt with foster kids, but since I was definitely not Indian, they didn’t want anything to do with me. The police had no clue what to do. So Mom and Dad stepped forward and said they’d be happy to take me home until things got worked out.”

  “As simple as that,” Gerri murmured.

  “As simple as that,” Eileen smiled. “Like taking home a lost puppy. Once they had me in Wyoming, South Dakota was happy to wash its hands of me. So after searching for a year, the state declared me free for adoption and I think it took about five minutes for the paperwork to go through. They didn’t change my name, though. It was the only thing I carried out of the wreck, and they wanted me to keep it.”

  “Wow,” Gerri said, her face alight. “You are one lucky woman, Eileen Reed.”

  “I know,” Eileen said. “I know I am. And that’s what I want to be, Gerri. Daughter of Tracy and Paul, sister to John. I don’t want to be some little girl by the side of the road, next to the body of her crazy dead mom.”

  “You are their daughter, Eileen, and you always will be,” Gerri said firmly. “But you are also your birth parents’ daughter.”

  “I know,” Eileen said. Gerri fixed her with a stern look, and Eileen wilted back in her chair. “Okay,” she mumbled. “Maybe I don’t know s
o well.”

  “Eileen, I’m not just a sponge, you know. I’m here to give you tools. To arm you, as it were, just like your guns and your badge. We aren’t just going to pick at our old wounds and admire the scar tissue, we’re going to get beyond them.”

  “I want to forget all about it,” Eileen said. “Why can’t I just forget about it?”

  “Because it’s a part of who you are. Do you know how many parents kill their children every year?”

  “How many?” Eileen asked with a sigh.

  “I don’t know,” Gerri said promptly, and dimpled into another infectious laugh. “I pretend to be a fountain of knowledge, but I actually have a cheat sheet on my clipboard. Guess what my cheat sheet is all about today?”

  “Adoption,” Eileen grinned.

  “Adoption. Next week, I’ll have a great slew of facts and figures for you. Just let me arm you with this today. Lots of parents kill their kids, every year. Hardly any of them kill themselves along with their children. They drown them, shake them, burn them alive, strap them into car seats and let the car coast into a lake. But they don’t kill themselves along with their kids. They walk away and try to get away with murder. Your mother, crazy as she was, didn’t do that.”

  “So what’s better about killing herself along with me?”

  “Do you think she hated life? Hated her condition, hated what was becoming of her?”

  “Definitely,” Eileen said without hesitation. She could remember her mother’s black fits of depression, the hours she spent staring into a mirror without moving, the crying, and the maniacal laughter. She remembered being held by her mother, nearly crushed in her arms, as though Eileen weren’t a child but a comforting teddy bear.

  “Then take this with you today, Eileen. She wanted a release from a life of hell for herself. And she tried to take you away from that hell, too. She had no idea that the whole world wasn’t just the way she thought it was. She tried to release you as she released herself.”

  “She tried to kill me out of love?” Eileen tried for a cynical laugh and it stuck in her throat like a fish bone.

  “She loved you, Eileen,” Gerri said earnestly. “She was sick and she was confused and she abused you horribly, but she loved you. It was a broken love, but it was still love. Think about that, just take it with you. Next week, we’ll talk again.”

  “Time to go?” Eileen asked shakily. “I don’t know if I can stand up.”

  “I’m sure you can, girl,” Gerri said. “Me, I’m meeting my husband at home for lunch, and I’m going to cry and cry and make him hold me. He always knows when I tell my own story. He can see it in my face. So I need to go, too.”

  “Thank you,” Eileen said, and was surprised to find she meant it. She stood, and managed it without wobbling. “I feel like going home and sleeping until next week.”

  “It’s called catharsis, my dear,” Gerri said. “Fixing what’s wrong doesn’t come easy. Now out with you, before we get all weepy and girlish with each other.” Gerri shepherded Eileen to the door and waved her out after giving her a firm, no nonsense hug. It wasn’t motherly or girlish, and it felt just right.

  “Next week, okay,” Eileen said numbly. “I will think things over.”

  “Just let it simmer. And remember, I carry a lighter. No one on this earth will know a word of your story, not my husband, not anyone.”

  “Okay,” Eileen said. She walked out through the waiting room and into the brightness of a beautiful late August day. The grass was overwhelmingly green, like something out of a drug scene in a movie. Nothing seemed quite right. The angles of the buildings seemed a little out of true, and the cars in the parking lot were too shiny. Her own Jeep was blazing hot and stuffy inside when she opened her door. She sat down anyway and started the air conditioner, looking at the windshield instead of through it. She noticed the clarity of the new glass, replaced shortly after Teddy Shaw blew out her old windshield. There were already several tiny pits in the glass, catching the noon sun and blazing like tiny diamond chips.

  Eventually the cold of the air conditioner and the reassuring comfort of her Jeep brought her back.

  “What a morning,” she said to herself, blinking her vision into focus. Suddenly she remembered what Rosen was doing while she was getting her guts hung up to dry by Gerri Matthews. He was doing a background check on Alan Baxter. The man who could answer questions that she didn’t know if she had the courage to ask.

  “Gerri,” she said to herself as she drove out of the parking lot. “Gerri, I met my father yesterday.” She laughed, thinking of Gerri’s owl-eyed response. She spotted a sign for a sub shop and her stomach awoke and growled at her. She was hungry, ravenously hungry, as though she’d run a marathon with Gerri instead of just sat in comfortable armchairs and talked to each other.

  “I’d rather have run a marathon,” she said to herself, and pulled into the sub shop parking lot. She felt hollowed out with hunger, but she could feel her energy rising back inside of her. It was over. She’d told a stranger the worst story of her life and she’d survived it. Time for a sub sandwich and a huge iced tea, and then back to work.

  13

  Great Falls, Virginia

  “Okay, this is what I’ve got. It might not be much good,” Lucy warned Eileen. She had just bathed Hank and he was sitting in her lap chewing on a squeaky baby toy. Drool ran down his chin, and he smelled wonderful, a clean warm baby scent that was the finest thing Lucy had ever smelled.

  “Tell me,” Eileen said. “I hope you have something new.”

  “First of all, Krista Lewis is dead. You knew?”

  “Not when I first called, actually. But I do now. Who was she?”

  “She was an environmental engineer. She worked for Riverworks, a government contractor enviro company. The head of Riverworks is Walter Albrose. You probably don’t know him, but he swings a lot of weight in D.C. Former head of the EPA, lawyer, golfing buddies with every President since Bush, apparently. But as far as I can tell, Riverworks isn’t corrupt. Powerful and political and dedicated to a clean environment, but not corrupt. I’m going to have Krista’s autopsy online here as soon as the Pueblo medical examiner puts it out. Do you want it?”

  “Yeah,” Eileen sighed. “She was murdered. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “That’s what I’ve read. Walter Albrose is on fire out here, trying to find out what happened to her. She was a good, solid engineer with good instincts. She was working on some kind of stream pollution in the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. That’s where she was found, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “And every other hit I get on the Internet on her name is on the UFO nets. There was something very strange about her death, and the UFO guys are going crazy.”

  “I don’t think it was UFOs,” Eileen said doubtfully.

  “Okay,” Lucy said. “I’m not up on UFOs.”

  This wasn’t precisely true. Four years ago Lucy let her top-secret clearance and her computer snoop in every government archive looking for information on the so-called saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico. She’d seen a UFO documentary on The Learning Channel and it made her ravenously curious. She found some interesting documents that were so cropped they were gibberish. She found some files that were locked so tightly even she couldn’t pry them open. She got nervous after a while and stopped looking. Whatever the government had about Roswell, not even a CIA agent with top-secret clearance could take a look.

  The only other time Lucy had become nervous about her government snooping was when she found out what happened to Eileen’s friend Bernie Ames, a pilot who’d crashed herself and her A-10 combat plane into a mountain. She thought she’d get the government reports on Bernie’s crash without any trouble, but after her second attempt to access the Office of Special Investigations database, she’d received a stiff e-mail asking for an explanation. She talked her way out of trouble but it was obvious she wouldn’t be allowed access.

  So she used a virus. When the Office of S
pecial Investigations bureaucrat sent her the e-mail, she sent him an e-mail apology card. The card was animated and adorable, a little puppy who barked and ran in circles and held up her spotted paw. The puppy said she was sorry and could they still be friends? Hal Blackwell, the OSI bureaucrat, had mailed her back a cheerful response accepting her apology. Lucy almost felt guilty at his response. When Hal had opened the animated card, he’d started up two computer programs that were contained in the same e-mail. One program was the spotted puppy. The other program was a virus that examined the logging data of the OSI computer and found passwords. At the end of the day, Lucy had her own account in the top-secret OSI computer and the virus had vanished without a trace. No tracking system could find her now; she had her own perfectly legal account on the computer. She used it and kept the account. After all, she might need it another time.

  She delivered the information to Eileen personally, at Hank’s baptism. She sat with Eileen in the back guest room while the party roared down the hall. Eileen bent her head over the sheets of paper, her hair swinging down over her face.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said, putting her hand on Eileen’s shoulder.

  Eileen sighed and let the sheets fall to the coverlet of the bed.

  “It could have been me,” she said. The report, still classified, had been about a malfunction in Bernie’s oxygen equipment. The mixture had been fouled and Bernie had gone into a delusional state where her abilities were compromised.

  “Compromised,” Lucy said bitterly. “She was hypoxic and dying, and she did her best to land her plane anyway. It wasn’t her fault.”

  “They fixed the oxygen equipment failure,” Eileen said. “I remember when they came around and did that. They didn’t even ground us. They said it was just a routine upgrade of the equipment.”

  “Didn’t want to scare the pilots, perhaps,” Lucy said.